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Announcing the Top Rated Platform-as-a-Service Solutions for 2018

May 8th, 2018 7 min read

Today, we awarded the 2018 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Platform-as-a-Service Solutions. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are unique in that they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user satisfaction scores.

Here are the winners in each segment, listed in order of research frequency on TrustRadius. We have also provided insights on how to pick the right PaaS solution based on your needs and current industry trends.

Overall Top Rated

Top Rated by Enterprises

Top Rated by Mid-Sized Companies

Top Rated by Small Businesses

What is Platform-as-a-Service?

Platform-as a-Service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provide a computing platform and a solution stack as a service. It is a set of tools and services designed to make coding and deploying applications much more efficient.

A PaaS platform can be a very good way to develop scalable web applications with modest up-front investment. The emergence of PaaS is designed to release application developers from much of the complexity around what has come to be known as DevOps, which seeks to merge application development and deployment into a more streamlined process. A PaaS provides developers with the operational components underlying application development, such as operating systems, databases, and middleware. Developers of business applications are released from the overhead of worrying about scalability and security issues and are free to focus on developing applications.

Trends in PaaS

As the PaaS concept grows in popularity, a number of trends are emerging that are expanding the PaaS market space. Cloud integration tools have now adopted the PaaS approach resulting in a brand new category of tools called Integration PaaS or iPaaS. There are also PaaS for testing and QA. But perhaps the biggest trend in this space is the emergence of low-code PaaS allowing business users to build new cloud applications with little or no coding.

Choosing the right PaaS solution

The advantages of using a PaaS are clear. These platforms provide developers with a lot of freedom and allow them to try things on a limited basis before building an application out completely. However, deciding which platform to choose is not always so easy. 

One issue that commonly comes up when selecting a PaaS is the application and data portability. One type of PaaS is vertically integrated with the underlying Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform, while other portable platforms are open-source. It’s always a good idea to ask proprietary vendors about open protocols and standards to avoid vendor lock-in.

Another differentiating factor is the strength of the platform user community. A vibrant user community and ecosystem of third-party developers can be critical to successful adoption.

A third consideration is which development frameworks and languages are supported. If you are a .NET shop, it is obviously imperative that your PaaS supports that environment. The same is true for other commonly used development environments like Java or Ruby.

One of the most important considerations in choosing a platform, though, is understanding how easy it is to deploy and learn, and how well it fits with the existing IT environment. Enterprises already have large IT investments, and if the platform is easy to deploy and manage (sometimes leveraging existing tools management tools), the likelihood of success is higher.

For prospective PaaS buyers, TrustRadius reviews can be very helpful in understanding things that cannot be determined from a vendor’s website. Reviewers frequently provide crucial information on things like deployment difficulty, customer service, integration with existing tools and applications, and general ease of use.

Top Rated Criteria

Products included in the 2018 Top Rated Platform-as-a-Service Solutions list must have been in the top tier of their category TrustMap on April 27, 2018, to earn a Top Rated badge. To qualify for the Platform-as-a-Service Solutions TrustMap, products must have 10 reviews and ratings on TrustRadius. Every reviewer is verified and every review is vetted before publication. Products are plotted on the map based on end-user data, including users’ likelihood to recommend scores as well as buyer research patterns. To learn more about TrustMaps and Top Rated methodology, check out this page.

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